Arts & Crafts

Our Dollar Tree has a lot of fun craft items. Yesterday I bought 2 bags of styro-foam balls (various sizes), acrylic paint, and colored pipe cleaners.

Unfortunately I do not have pictures (the lense of my camera is broken! Hopefully I will get it fixed soon!), but today the boys all made bees. So cute! Justin actually made his entire bee out of pipe cleaners. Jonathan and Ryan used the balls and pipe cleaners. The balls were the body and the pipe cleaners served as legs and wings. This goes along with our bee unit study (and of course just for fun). We named Ryan's bee "Miss Apis" since Apis is part of the scientific name for bees.

Justin used the remaining balls to paint for his solar system (he is studying it on his own).

September Update

I know it is about time for an update! I don't have a lot of time, but there are a few things I want to mention. Hopefully I will find time to update with some pictures soon.

• We have the new & exciting privilege of meeting with Jonathan's old school friend Anna once a week! She is homeschooling as well. This is a lot of fun not only for the boys, but for me as well since I have made a new friend with her mother Stacie.
  
• We are still studying bees. Currently we are reading:

The Bee People

A very delightful classic I must say (1899)! I had downloaded it as a freebie several months ago, and when we decided to do our unit study I remembered I had downloaded it. (What a nice coincidence huh?)

Here is a little synopsis I found on another site:

An attractive introduction to the curious structure, habits, and activities of bees, in which readers learn how the bees' wondrous body parts equip them to gather nectar and pollen, construct the hive, and nurture the young, and how the different kinds of bees interact in the life of the hive. Over one hundred pen drawings [emphasis mine... these are beautiful!] by the author illustrate the features described in the text.

We are also reading another nice little book called The Brownies at Home by Palmer Cox (written in 1893). I absolutely love it! The entire book is written in poetry form, and the little "brownies" are illustrated all throughout the book. The boys enjoy looking at the pictures and choosing which ones they like the best. Evidently, as I have looked into the brownies, they were very famous in their day. Books, toys, dolls, and even a camera were named after them! The copy we have is black and white, but this picture above gives a good idea of what the brownies look like. This particular book is about the months of the year. Justin & Jonathan are working on their very own Spelling & Vocabulary notebooks based on the Noah Webster's American Spelling book (The Original Blue Backed speller). These are not only a great way to keep up with their education, but they are also very fun and entertaining! I give them a new list of words, they are to look each of the words up in their dictionary, write the definitions,write a story about the words, and possibly draw pictures for chosen words. Their stories are very entertaining! Ryan is learning to read! I know I mentioned we checked out Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons from the library. I had to take the book back, so there was a break of time where we didn't get to go over the lessons. Thankfully, I was able to order it from Amazon and we have our very own copy now. - I am also reading story books to him from the library. - Along with these lessons, we are going through Disney Number & Counting & Alphabet learning workbooks.These are cute workbooks I found at the Dollar tree. He traces numbers and letters & counts. He enjoys working through these with me as we snuggle on my big bed. -On his own he does a LOT of drawing and cutting out with his scissors.

An update on our Unit Study

Just a few pictures from our bee unit study. We are far from finished, but I thought it would be nice to document some of our activities with some pictures.
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*Playing a game about bees*
I read to them about how bees send "bee scouts" to find nectar, and then how they dance to communicate to other bees where nectar is found. Then we played the proboscis (bee tongue) game. We initially used party blowouts with velcro attached (to represent the bees' tongue), but the boys DESTROYED them!

Jonathan and Ryan were pretending to be bees. Justin was as well, but he wasn't about to let me take a picture of him with his tongue stuck to a flower! I don't blame him because I wouldn't want to share a picture of how I was showing them how the bees dance.
At least it was fun, and I hope it helps them remember!

Jonathan writing paragraphs about different types of bees... (yes, they doodle on everything!)

Ryan's page. He colored the bee picture, cut it out, and pasted it along with some flower cut-outs I provided. He wrote the word "bee" as I told him how to spell it.
Another one of Ryan's project. It says "Buzzy Bee: Tulips are sweet"
Jonathan's
Jonathan drew this bee free-hand and labeled the parts
Justin's notebook. We use sheet protectors for each page (thus the shine on the pages). They are imperative for creating nice, lasting notebooks.
Justin's page about "carpenter bees" (Jonathan is doing the same paragraphs)
.... and bumble bees
Justin's drawing of a bee with its parts

I still have several pages of things to do and read to them as well as going through their notebooks and helping them to correct mistakes. Hopefully I will have more pictures to post soon!

Bee Videos

I wanted the boys to see some bees in action, so we watched some videos on Youtube. My favorite was the one about the melipona bee from "exploration films".

Bee Unit Study

The boys were really excited the other day when Pa-pa & Grammy gave them a bee's hive. We ended up keeping it for about a week, and then it started to mold so we had to throw it away. It was so fun to study it!
It was very fascinating because the queen bee was right on top of it, and you could see eggs and worker bees on and in it as well. Unfortunately I didn't get a good picture of it but it looked a lot like the one here----> click this link.

Because of this experience, Justin told me he wanted to do a study about bees. Great idea since this would epitomize life-integrated learning!

I decided we should do it in note-book (scrap-booking style). We hope to including copy-work, work sheets, essays, pictures, dictations, art work, and whatever else we decide to add. I have already collected a lot of resources to use throughout the upcoming weeks.

Justin said he is making TWO of them (One that is directed by me and the other to make "however he wants it".) :-)

Today we read an introduction to our unit study, and then we proceeded to create the covers and artwork for their notebooks.

They drew & cut out several pictures before a decision was made on the final product. You can click any of them to see a closer picture.


Ryan enjoys cutting and pasting. Of course he is at the perfect age for this.
You gotta hold your mouth just right. I caught him sticking his tongue out a couple of times, but couldn't get it on film fast enough.
He animates just about everything he draws. If you look closely, you can see smiling clouds and a smiling sun.


Justin did not want to use the bee the other two boys used (too cutesy, I think), so he drew his own bees.

Here Justin is drawing a "killer bee" for his very own "separate notebook." (you can click the picture to see his drawing up close and the copybook nearby.)


I am looking forward to seeing the final products, yet I am anticipating enjoying each moment as we learn together.